For South Carolina strollers on the beach, it would be a Saturday afternoon show.
Two US fighter planes hover above them, armed with air-to-air missiles. Then a throw.
From an altitude of 58,000 feet, one of the jets fired a single short-range “Sidewinder” missile.. It was 2:39 pm US Eastern time.
Eyewitnesses on the ground in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina captured a moment that will upend relations between China and America. Four hundred miles north, at the Pentagon in Virginia, military commanders monitored a complex operation.
From the amateur images taken on the beach, the impact of the missile was evident. 11 miles above, the shot was perfect.
The balloon, a speck in the sky that had caused days of intrigue, entertainment but also diplomatic drama, deflated in seconds.
The payload below dropped rapidly, falling more than 60,000 feet into the Atlantic below. It was approaching 4 in the morning in Beijing.
Officials would know immediately that their “weather balloon” had been shot down. No doubt they were watching, if not watching, his every move.
But it took several hours for their Foreign Office to draw up the predictably angry statement by “Strong dissatisfaction and protest against the use of force by the United States to attack an unmanned civilian aircraft”.
As the sun rose over Beijing, it was disappearing over the east coast of America. But six miles off the South Carolina coast, a flotilla of boats and ships was already beginning to arrive.
Over an area of about seven miles, ships and specialists from the US Coast Guard, US Navy and FBI had begun collecting debris.
In the days to come, divers and unmanned submarines will scour the seabed, suitably shallow at just over 40 feet. The weather is good in the next few days but this will still be a complicated operation.
It will take at least a day or two before a specialized salvage vessel will be able to lift larger pieces of wreckage out of the water.
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“They successfully removed it”
The goal will be to harvest a potential gold mine of information and data from the debris. It is likely that investigators will attempt to reconstruct the balloon’s payload and learn from it.
Among the things they will want to find out: Was there any US technology inside the Chinese equipment? US officials have long suspected China of commercial and technological theft.
But beyond the spectacle on the Carolina beaches, and beyond the “balloon watch” gimmicks of cable news channels, rest assured, this is an extremely serious time.
There is no more important geopolitical relationship than that between China and America.
It’s a relationship that impacts us all and was in a bad way before the curious white dot appeared in the skies over Montana.
